Turing Project Reflections
Last Thursday, Aram and I gave our final presentation for our first class here at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. We had spent the preceeding four weeks creating a Java applet that introduces people to the Turing machine, a simple mathematical model of computers. This week, we're supposed to reflect on the process and what we learned (a lot, in my case).
After we decided on a concept, Aram and I retreated to our areas of expertise and started working: Aram on the design, and I on the coding. Two weeks later, two days before the presentation, our program was nearly done and we felt good. Then we tried it out on a few people from the non-Turing machine half of the class. That half-hour taught me more than the previous three weeks. No one could use the program without our help, and the initial tutorial felt too long and boring. I wanted to redo a good portion of the interface. It was a shame that our class didn't talk about prototyping, or allow us to use a language that facilates it (like Flash). We would have ended up with a better-designed program, though not necessarily one that was as functional.
That trade-off between design and implementation is another of the main lessons I'm learning here. As a software developer, my job was to get a program to work. Now, that's not always the primary goal. If you have a good enough idea and present it well, someone else can handle the implementation. Not that I don't want to build working projects, but I'm starting to understand that it takes a long time to build a system, and I'm better off with a finished design and prototype code than half of the production code. It gets other people more excited about your idea.